Island
Living 33: The Geezer Geeks are Here
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
At the end of
my last column, it was the end of July, and I was
wandering through MacWorld Expo in New York City's
Javits Center, being very, very afraid.
What scared
me? Not the ridiculous time-warped Microsoft booth
with its presenters dressed up as the Village People,
every half-hour bursting robotically into some Bill
Gates promo to the tune of "Join the Navy";
that was just sad, and dumb. No, it was the fact
that I understood about fifty percent of what was
going on. And what's spooky is not that I was up
to speed on only half of it, but that I was able
to comprehend as much as I did. For example:
-
I deciphered without
help the symbolism of the music chosen to
precede Steven Jobs's keynote talk on Wednesday
morning: Buddy Holly, the Ventures, and other
garage-band classics. That's what one cluster
of teenagers made happen with little more
than electricity and creative genius. The
Mac is what another gang of adolescents did
with the same raw materials; it's the garage-band
rock & roll of the computer world.
-
I knew without being
told that the young guy who walked out when
Jobs was announced wasn't Jobs at all, but
rather Noah Wylie, who played him to perfection
in the recent HBO movie Pirates of Silicon
Valley.
-
I got most of Jobs's
presentation, and even explained some of it
to the delightful young Japanese correspondent
who seated herself beside me. (Of course,
Jobs is no spring chicken, now pushing geezerdom
himself. One of us, one of us.)
-
After a few minutes
of hands-on and a quick look at the specs,
I found myself with an immediate opinion about
the iBook, Apple's new consumer portable.
(It's perfect for your mom; she can buy a
fun purse to match.)
-
A very helpful talk
with a rep from FileMaker Pro clarified a
problem I've been having with a sales-and-inventory
program for writers that I'm developing with
that software.
-
The term "relational
database" no longer terrifies me, I discovered,
since I now know what it means. Ditto for
"records" and "fields."
-
Watching a demo of
the new release of GoLive! Cyberstudio, a
website management program, my jaw dropped
open as I realized the time-saving value of
one added feature -- and the speaker spotted
me, laughed, and threw me a prized T-shirt.
-
I admired and coveted
the new edition of Adobe Photoshop.
-
Reps from three accounting-software
programs -- QuickBooks Pro, M.Y.O.B. Plus,
and Aatrix -- talked me through the comparative
pros and cons of their variations on that
theme, and I was able to get answers to the
questions that concerned me about their products'
options and limitations.
-
Worst of all, I've
become a Mac addict, so devoted that I'll
show up at a Mac-specific souk like
this one for two days running; moreover, whenever
possible I'm working with Mac and Claris software
-- I even do all my writing now in AppleWorks
5.
I'm not sure
you get the full ramifications of all this. Let
me spell it out: Here you have a guy who showed
no aptitude for hard science or math past the eighth
grade; who hated every minute of his three years
in hell at Stuyvesant, one of New York City's three
science-intensive high schools; and who could never
fathom the workings of the slide rule (commonly
carried by my classmates in a leather pouch attached
to their belts, like some nerd version of a Bowie
knife), the very sight of which used to make him
twitch. Today he's happily, cheerfully, willingly
strolling around a computer trade show with a bunch
of other Mac fanatics, knowledgeably -- well, semi-knowledgeably
-- talking computer shop with all and sundry, covering
the event in his professional capacity as a frequent
writer on matters electronic and cyberspatial. Don't
you see? This means -- oh, the horror, the horror!
-- that I'm on the verge of becoming (if I haven't
already crossed the line) a computer geek.
And that will make me . . . a geezer geek!
That's my personal
crisis. Now here's yours: I'm not alone. Far from
it. Once that recognition dawned, I started looking
around, and the gray-hair count stunned me. Everywhere
I turned -- even in the gaming area, though the
demographics were lowest there -- I saw geezer geeks.
It's probably ungentlemanly of me to say so, and
of course I didn't ask, but Phyllis Wier, who publishes
the magazines Digital New York and Digital
Chicago, seems a probable geezer. At a private
Peachpit Press dinner to which I got invited, many
of the authors of that lucid series of how-to books
were inarguably geezers. Mike Baron, at the show
to represent SCORE, the Small Business Administration's
volunteer wing -- unabashedly geezer. Software developers,
hardware developers, peripherals manufacturers,
programmers, editors, publishers, writers: geezers
to the left of me, geezers to the right. Not to
mention the countless geezer attendees. And most
of them geezer geeks to boot, from what I gathered
in direct conversation or overheard by dint of discreet
but shameless eavesdropping.
Is the computer
world ready for this? I think not. The hype, after
all, tells us incessantly that it's a young person's
technology. Maybe that was true once, but no more.
Yet the only model we have of the geezer geek is
the 1950s generation of Univac experts, those please-do-not-spindle-fold-or-mutilate
guys with the short hair and the ties and the plastic
pocket protectors. But today's geezer geek comes
in far more flavors than the iMac, everything from
your stereotypical housewife or gone-fishin' senior-citizen
type to a wide assortment of "queer, odd, or
eccentric" individuals, who collectively represent
a steadily growing segment of the digitized and
online population to which absolutely no one --
especially the computer designers and marketers
-- is paying any attention whatsoever.
There's not
a single computer product I've seen anywhere --
hardware, software, ergonomic work-station equipment
-- that promotes itself as senior-friendly, much
less senior-specific. The American Association of
Retired Persons has since 1995 maintained a website
-- www.aarp.org -- that includes an online version
of the magazine. And the magazine regularly refers
to digital technology: For example, a recent "Lifelines"
column included a review of cooking-related software
programs and reference to the "How Stuff Works"
website.
Conversely,
the computer industry does virtually no promotion
to that burgeoning segment of the population. You
won't find a single computer ad in most issues of
the AARP’s magazine, Modern Maturity
-- which has a circulation of 20.5 million people,
many of them with substantial amounts of discretionary
income to spend. (The special computer issue that
kicked off 1999 had just one -- from Compaq. The
March-April 1999 issue included Jennifer Reid Holman's
"Is Your Computer Ready?" -- a piece on
Y2K preparedness -- and no computer ads.)
And that means
this industry is missing a serious bet. Because
we geezer geeks aren't just coming, we're already
here. Our ranks swell daily. Pretty soon -- you
read it here first -- there'll be an AARP recruiting
booth at the Mac and PC fairs; they're too savvy
to ignore such a trend.
Now hear this:
The time to start planning Geezer Geek Expo has
arrived.
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©
Copyright 2000 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
By permission of the author and Image/World
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